The Afterlives

by Thomas Pierce

  —

  HIS WEDDING NIGHT. He and Clara have married at last, and the reception at his parents’ house has come to an end. The guests are slowly making their exit.

  “Be good to her,” Mr. Hopstead tells Robert, squeezing his hand before setting off into the cold night.

  Of course Robert will be good to her! He loves her more than life itself!

  The house is a mess, but Robert’s mother says to leave it for the morning. Clara follows Robert up the stairs to his bedroom. He shuts the door quietly and, not wanting to seem too eager, waits a moment before turning to her. But she’s looking out the window, working on her buttons. What’s she thinking about? When he slides out of his suit jacket and folds it over the chair, he hears a few rice kernels tick against the hardwood. The floors out in the hall creak as his parents turn in for bed. A door shuts. Muffled voices. “I’m exhausted,” he hears his father say.

  Robert removes his tie and his socks and his shirt. Clara waits for him in the bed with what seems to him a somewhat sullen expression on her face. Buyer’s remorse? They are in his room at his parents’ house, and even though they’re married now, with no need to worry about being discovered, Robert reminds her they should probably keep as quiet as possible. Under the sheet, her skin is soft and cool against his. He slides on top of her, and she has her hands on his shoulders, her mouth a tight line, a slight hint of a smile.

  Afterward, as he tries to fall asleep, his stomach feels swollen, achy. Maybe he ate too much cake. Maybe he danced too much. He doesn’t want to pass gas, not with Clara right there beside him. How do other couples manage these situations? What if she’s still awake and she hears him?

  He slips out of bed, his feet meeting the cold floor, and dashes into the hallway, where he very quietly passes gas outside his parents’ door. The floor pops beneath his feet, and his father’s face appears in the crack.

  “Is something wrong?” he asks, stepping into the hall. “God, Robert, that smell!”

  He tells his father good night and returns to bed. He still can’t sleep. Will he ever be able to again? They’ll need their own house. Eventually. Soon. They can’t stay here forever, with his parents. They need to be on their own.

  —

  AT THE TOP OF A SMALL HILL on a quiet street it waits for them: a two-story brick house, built in the Queen Anne style, with an extraordinarily large veranda, painted white, ornamented with reliefs and balustrades. The window eaves protrude like the puffed eyelids of a man who hasn’t slept in days. A small garden in the front yard is protected by a low wrought-iron fence. Two blocks away, there’s a small community park.

  He asks Clara if she likes it.

  She pulls him close and kisses his cheek. “It’s beautiful.”

  The house on Graham Street was built four years ago when a hundred-acre parcel north of downtown was divided and sold off as lots for middle- and upper-class families. A brand-new suburb with its very own streetcar stop. Not too far from the furniture store so Robert will be able to walk to and from work.

  He leads her inside for her next surprise. In the dining room, he reveals a beautiful oak table. In the sitting room (Tada!), a green Dutch sofa, identical to the one at her parents’ house. The staircase is at the back of the house, next to the kitchen, and he leads her up to the bedroom and reveals their new bed. Down the hall, he informs her, are two more bedrooms. (Just in case.) She flings herself onto the bed, rolls over, giggles. Robert can’t remember ever feeling this happy and hopeful, but at the outer fringes of this happiness it still lurks, that mouth-filled face, so many needle-teeth, broken, wet, waiting to grind at his ears.

  —

  NO MATTER WHERE HE GOES, the mouth finds him. Even on the merry-go-round in Shula Park with his brother, he senses it’s near. Under the pond, it swims, waiting to swallow up the skiers.

  Over eight thousand lightbulbs! Robert wonders whose job it is to replace the lights. What a job that would be, the keeper of the bulbs, screwing and unscrewing one after the next, all day long. Wendell calls over to him from the line in front of the roller coaster, and Robert runs over to join him. As they stand there, hands jammed into their pockets, the strangest thought pops into Robert’s head—that he’s done this before, stood in this very line with his younger brother, a thousand times. But no, that’s not quite it. It’s not that he’s already done it; it’s that he’s always been doing it. He’s never not been in this line.

  —

  HE’S NEVER not been walking down this hallway either. Everywhere he goes, it’s the same. That feeling of déjà vu.

  Robert follows a nurse to his appointed room, an austere but comfortable space with two twin beds, a writing desk, a small hanging closet, and a single window. Robert doesn’t intend to be here very long. Just a few days, he promised Clara before leaving for Atlanta. He drops his suitcase on the opposite bed and stares out the window, to the lawn, where two bald men are sitting in Adirondack chairs. A knock at the door: it’s Robert’s cousin, Hal Skinner, a psychiatrist. They shake hands, and Hal encourages him to sit down while they determine, together, a regimen that might get Robert back in working order again. Talk-therapy sessions, swims in the pond, and a few ceramics classes in the art house?

  —

  CLARA COMES INTO THE BEDROOM with a dog in her arms.

  “Who’s is that?”

  “Ours.” She smiles.

  Why on earth? he thinks.

  Why now? he thinks.

  The last thing they need.

  What the hell is she thinking?

  All their problems, and she’s adopted a dog.

  “His name is Houdini,” she tells him delightfully, pressing her lips to his hairy nape.

  —

  THE DOG, halfway up the stairs, is barking again.

  Clara is out for the morning. Robert quiets the dog and listens for a few minutes. He doesn’t hear a voice. Of course not. Clara’s always had such a powerful imagination. The house is only four years old, and the previous owners moved to Raleigh, so how could it be haunted?

  —

  CLARA, HER RIGHT HAND TIGHT over his mouth, gazes down at Robert for a few seconds and then shuts her eyes, head tilting backward. They’re on the green Dutch sofa in the Hopstead living room. The crack in the ceiling bulges like a face. He reaches up for her. Her arms are goose-bumped. The house is cold. He throws his arms around her back, feels her spine.

  —

  SO HE’S TROUBLED, is that it? Melancholic? Is there a word for what he is? His cousin says not to worry over labels. Robert hates to be away from home, away from Clara, but he needs his rest.

  A nurse compels him to spend an entire afternoon sitting in an Adirondack chair near the pond. The “innervating sunlight,” she calls it. The sun strikes the left side of his face as he rolls another cigarette. The arm of his chair is smudged black. Down the grassy hill, at the edge of the pond, a man in a gray sweater is screaming at the geese. A nurse carrying a tray of teas rushes over to help this poor man. Robert closes his eyes and rotates his face so that the sunlight falls more evenly upon it.

  “There you are,” his cousin Dr. Skinner says, walking up from behind with his hands in the pockets of his white coat.

  Robert lights his cigarette.

  Despite the protestations of the nurse, the man at the pond will not stop screaming at the geese. The geese are villains. Are miscreants. Thieves. Demons. Robert and his cousin watch the nurse struggle to subdue the man, who won’t shut up about the goose poop on his shoe.

  “I think the geese might have robbed that man,” Robert says. “Or murdered his parents, maybe. He really has it out for those geese.”

  “That’s our Mr. Croft. Arrived here yesterday. He caught his wife with another man and stabbed the poor guy in the eye with a screwdriver.”

  Robert wonders if maybe the man shouldn’t be in jail.<
br />
  “Probably,” Hal says. “But he’s got money. Lots of it. I think he paid off the wife’s lover to keep it quiet and then he checked himself in here. He says he’s had some sort of breakdown.”

  Robert nods, disinterestedly.

  “Well, I’ve come to send you home, Robert. It’s time.”

  “That’s your professional advice?”

  “It is. Clara will be glad to have you. You can always return. Door’s open. You know that.”

  “Six months from now, I won’t be able to afford this place. Clara doesn’t understand what’s happening, Hal. I’ve shielded her from it, which in retrospect maybe wasn’t the best idea. She lives in a dream world. In that house all day. With the dog. We’re going to lose the house, Hal.”

  “Clara understands more than you think, Robert. You’ll be fine. Even if you lose the house. Anyway you can’t hide here forever hoping it will all blow over.”

  Robert stubs out his cigarette on the arm of the chair and flicks it away into the grass. The man at the edge of the pond is quiet now. The nurse is patting his back as if he’s a baby in need of a burp.

  “What you’re going through, this isn’t just about the store,” Hal says. “You do understand that, I hope.”

  —

  DRIVING BY THE STORE, he sees that they’ve already repainted over the name on the brick above the door. History will forget Lennox & Sons. Will forget the Lennoxes. Will forget them all. It was all for nothing, all that hard work, all the hand-wringing and desperation. He shouldn’t have hung on for as long as he did. Better to know when you’re beat. The showroom sits dark and empty. He wonders what his father would think of this development, if it would kill him all over again. A legacy destroyed, he can imagine his father saying.

  His father: Such a controlling man. So irascible. Temperamental. Unadaptable.

  —

  BUT THE DESIRE to impress his father, that never goes away, not quite. He’s nineteen years old. The ice truck arrives midday, and the deliveryman drops a large block of ice into the metal wash-bin in the middle of the showroom. In front of the dripping block, Robert sets up a GE oscillating loop-handle fan, which, as it happens, Lennox & Sons keeps in stock. Not only will it cool customers on this hot August day, but it might even help them sell a few fans. This demonstration was all Robert’s idea. He’s helping a customer when his father strides into the store from his neighborhood business association meeting. Passing through the showroom, his father doesn’t even seem to notice the four people who have huddled around the fan, the four people who surely would have left the store already if not for this attraction.

  When his father emerges from his office an hour later, a little bit of mustard at the corner of his mouth, he walks over to the half-melted ice block and then looks over at Robert, who’s doing his best not to seem too pleased with himself.

  “We’ll have a hard time selling this fan if people see that it’s already been used,” his father says. “Now we’ll have to discount it as a floor model.”

  “I thought it would keep people in the store if they weren’t sweating through their clothes.”

  “It’ll keep ’em, but it won’t keep the sort we want.”

  He unplugs the fan from the wall and moves it aside.

  “Get this bucket out of here before it starts leaking,” his father says.

  —

  HOUDINI WON’T BUDGE OFF the stairs again. Robert swats at him with a newspaper until the dog finally runs off in search of Clara, in search of scraps.

  Robert will have to close the store. There’s no getting out of it. It must be done.

  “Don’t be mad,” Clara says, “but I think you should call your brother.”

  “You’d love that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Why would I love that?”

  She reaches for his hand, but he moves it away.

  “I’m not calling him.”

  “He might be able to help. It’s like you said, about weathering the storm. Maybe he could help you weather it. It’s his name on the building, too, after all.”

  Robert says, “Wendell doesn’t give a damn about the business and he never has.”

  They’re on the sofa in the sitting room. It’s almost time for bed. He picks up the book he was reading but then puts it down on his lap again.

  “Have you been talking to him? Be honest!”

  “To Wendell? Please. I’m not answering that.”

  “So you have then!”

  “I’m not answering because I don’t like what it is you’re implying.”

  —

  HE AND CLARA are on the green Dutch sofa—the other one, the one in her parents’ house—and her knees are tight on either side of him. She closes her eyes, and her head rolls back. Up above, in the darkness, the ceiling bulges, hideously. The whole house will collapse one day. It’s falling apart all around them. Is she marrying him to escape all this? Does it matter? She stifles his moan with her hand, kisses his forehead, and leaves him on the couch. The ceiling bulge darkens, spidering outward. It’s found him again. The mouth, wetly, eats at the corners of the room.

  The plaster, a cereal mash.

  The timbers, cracked and splintering.

  —

  HE’S SMOKING YET ANOTHER CIGARETTE upstairs in his chair by the window. The dog, Houdini, is asleep in his lap. His suitcase is half-packed on the bed. The gauzy white window curtain, whirled about by the fan on the dresser, floats across Robert’s left arm. He can see down to the street below where a man in a wide white hat is hurrying along with long rolled papers under his arm, construction drawings maybe. Not far behind him, two women walk arm-in-arm in dresses with puffed-out shoulders and large belts around their waists.

  “Robert, please,” Clara says, coming into the room. “Don’t leave again.”

  She is wearing a loose floral dress with a wide white collar and large white buttons. He’s never seen this dress, though it couldn’t possibly be new. How would she have bought it? Her brown hair is cut short, chin-length, one side held back with a little white clip. She’s been crying. The dog’s eyes blink open and then close again.

  She asks him if it’s something that she said, if that’s why he’s leaving her again for Atlanta. She’s pleading with him. She just wants to understand why this is happening.

  “Money’s in the hutch,” he says. “Don’t forget the bills this time.”

  She’s crying now.

  “If anyone asks,” he continues, “my brother isn’t well, and that’s why I’m gone. I’m visiting Wendell in California.”

  He glances at the suitcase on the bed and explains, for what seems like the hundredth time, that he just needs rest. He rolls another cigarette. Clara moves behind the chair and begins to delicately massage his temples, but he grabs her wrists and drags her out from behind the chair to his side. Clara’s face contorts, reddens. She twists free of him.

  “Fine, go,” she says. “But I won’t be here when you get back. I swear to God I won’t be here if you leave again!”

  She disappears through the door. Distantly he hears her footsteps on the stairs. The smoke puffs up over his head, a small storm cloud that he considers thoughtfully. The dog, hot against his legs, yawns up at him. Stringed saliva between the teeth. Long white teeth flecked brown. The ribbed dark palate. That mouth, it always finds him, wherever he goes.

  A creak on the stairs. The dog leaps from Robert’s lap and runs out the door. Two seconds later he’s barking. Robert goes into the hall. The dog is on the staircase again, his nose jammed against a wall, growling. What a peculiar creature. Robert yells at him to please shut up, but Houdini keeps at it, yapping at the wall.

  “There’s nothing there!”

  Irritated, Robert goes back into his room and falls back into his chair. His head is throbbing again. His suitcase, on the bed, needs packi
ng. It can wait. Everything can wait. The curtain, flitting in the breeze, continues its flirtation with the end of his cigarette.

  •II•

  A PARTIAL EXISTENCE

  The most beautiful drive-up vista in the Blue Ridge Mountains is located just a few miles outside Shula on a mountain highway that overlooks our city. That’s not just according to me but also to various vista-ranking websites and glossy magazines bankrolled by chambers of commerce. The overlook is a popular destination, especially in the fall when the leaves begin to change, and finding a parking space can be difficult.

  On a whim, Annie and I bought a pint of orange juice and a cheap bottle of champagne at the BI-LO and drove up there one Saturday morning to mark the occasion of our one-year anniversary. Only as we were getting out of the car did we realize we’d forgotten to bring any glasses. I suggested we drive back down the highway to the gas station. Annie popped the champagne, took a swig from it, and then chased it with the OJ.

  “Just as good,” she said.

  We passed the bottle and the orange juice back and forth between us as we took in the view. A group of White Hairs, standing near their cars with their camera-phones, looked at us disapprovingly. The men were wearing knee-length shorts and pastel golf shirts. The women were dressed in capris and hiking shorts, their hair dyes nearly as brilliant as the leaves: glossy browns, burnt siennas, cherry reds, platinum blonds.

  “We’re celebrating,” I shouted over to them.

  They pretended not to hear me.

  “You don’t care what they think, do you?” Annie asked me.

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to be drinking up here.”

  Annie laughed. “You’re joking, right? Oh my God, you’re not.” She hooked her arm in mine. “Honey, you’ve got to lighten up.”

  Annie and I had married only a few months after our reunion at the restaurant. There were those who said we were rushing things, but we didn’t care. We wanted to be together. We needed to be. When I wasn’t near her, I felt bisected, incomplete. Only now that we were together did I fully understand how lonely I’d been before her. A big black hole of loneliness nipped at my heels, and hers was the hand—long-fingered, soft—that kept me from wobbling back into it.